Tag: Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

Backslidin’ Away

 

“Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away.”
— from “Slip Slidin’ Away”, a 1977 song by Paul Simon.

Recently the Virginia House of Delegates refused to vote on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), defeating it perhaps for good. If Virginia had voted in favor of the Amendment, that would have been the 38th and deciding vote among the states, and then the measure would have returned to the United States Congress for reconsideration of whether the time limit for ratification should be extended.


Seal of Virginia
The State Seal of Virginia. On February 21, on the grounds of the state capitol in Richmond, Virginia, two pro-ERA activists posed as the figures depicted in the seal, and one was arrested.

The Equal Rights Amendment is meant to constitutionally protect women’s rights and should be a common sense addition to the country’s legal framework, but anti-abortion activists and those who cling to traditional gender roles have long suspected the amendment would be used as grounds for protecting abortion rights of pregnant women besides guaranteeing women’s rights when they are at odds with men’s long standing privileges, and consequently they have done everything in their power, high and low, to defeat the amendment.

Meanwhile, in an official ceremony for a high school in Wisconsin, female cheerleaders were given “joke” awards for their physical attributes, such as largest breasts or butt, or skinniest body. When some parents and faculty objected to singling out emotionally immature girls this way, the cheerleaders’ coach, Patti Uttech, expressed dismay that “politically correct” people couldn’t understand how the awards were all in good fun. Last year another Wisconsin high school made national news after people became aware that a photographer posing a group of boys for a prom picture had encouraged them to raise their arms in what can only be viewed as a Nazi salute, and almost all the boys appeared to comply with enthusiasm.

Then there’s Goodloe Sutton, 80-year-old owner and editor of The Democrat-Reporter, a weekly newspaper in Linden, Alabama, who in a February 14 editorial railed against Democrats he supposed were plotting to raise taxes in Alabama, and called for the Ku Klux Klan to raid the homes of Democratic legislators in Washington, D.C.. He added even more hateful remarks when asked later for elaboration by other journalists from Alabama and elsewhere once his editorial became notorious. In 2019, Mr. Sutton’s beliefs and attitudes are more in tune with those from the year of his birth, 1939.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel perform “Slip Slidin’ Away” in the September 1981 Concert in Central Park in New York City.

Did those beliefs and attitudes ever go away in the intervening years? Perhaps partially, although mainly they went underground. Now with encouragement from the current resident of the Oval Office, ignorant and hateful talk is bubbling back to the surface across the land, and here and there action has followed. In the current environment, it will only get worse. The Ku Klux Klan of 1939 is resurrected by a bitter old man with a newspaper in Alabama. The Nazi Party of 1930s and 40s Germany is evoked by laughing schoolboys in Wisconsin. Again in Wisconsin, a high school cheerleaders’ coach hands out awards that would not have been out of place in 1950s America, though even then most people might have deemed them in questionable taste given the age of the recipients. And in Virginia an amendment to the United States Constitution goes down in flames because even in 2019 there are people – not all of them men – who cannot step away from controlling all women as if it were their right.
— Vita

 

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Reason to Smile

 

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” — Section 1 of the Equal Rights Amendment.

It’s a fair guess that at some point in their lives most women have had someone, usually a man, but sometimes another woman, urge them to smile more, as if it were incumbent upon women to always appear pleasant and non-threatening. No one tells men to smile, except maybe for pictures. This past week, on Wednesday, May 30, Illinois became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), leaving the amendment one state short of the approval by three fourths of the states required to become law. That’s reason to smile. Celebration, however, may still be a long struggle away.

 

When the United States Congress approved the ERA in 1972, they sent it on to the states with a seven year limit for ratification written into the proposal, something that had become common practice ever since the proposal for the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), with the one exception of the 19th Amendment (Women’s Suffrage). After ratification stalled at 35 states in 1977, Congress eventually granted an extension on the time limit until 1982. The amendment has remained in limbo since then, until 2017 when Nevada, under pressure from a renewed groundswell in the women’s rights movement due to current events both in politics and in the workplace, ratified the amendment to move the total to 36.

Alice Paul, with Mildred Bryan 159039v
Alice Paul, on the right, leader of the feminist movement in America and vice president of the Woman’s Party, meets with Mildred Bryan, youngest Colorado feminist, in the Garden of the Gods at Colorado Springs, where on September 23rd, 1925, the Party launched its western campaign for an amendment to the Constitution giving equal rights to women. Photo by H.L. Standley.

There is some question whether the amendment will indeed become law with ratification by a 38th state because of the time limit imposed in its proposal by Congress, and because a handful of state legislatures have rescinded their ratification since the 1970s. There is nothing explicit in Article V of the Constitution, which deals with the amendment process, stating Congress should impose a time limit on ratification. In the 1921 case of Dillon v. Gloss, the Supreme Court inferred from Article V that Congress had the power to impose a time limit, settling that argument on shaky ground. In 1939, in the case of Coleman v. Miller, the Supreme Court sent the ball back into Congress’s arena of politics on whether ratification by states after the expiration of a time limit had any validity, and whether states were allowed to rescind ratifications. Those questions have remained unchallenged, and therefore unsettled, ever since.

In an episode of the 1970s television show All in the Family, Archie Bunker argues with his neighbor Irene Lorenzo , played by Carroll O’Connor and Betty Garrett, about equal pay for equal work after Irene starts working at the same place as Archie. 46 years after Congress passed the ERA in 1972, the issue remains unsettled.

There has been a development since 1939 that further clouds the entire issue of a time limit on ratification, and that is the full ratification of the 27th Amendment (Congressional Pay Raises) in 1992, after a delay of 203 years since its passing by Congress in 1789. No time limit had been imposed by Congress in 1789, of course, but since it nonetheless became the law of the land after hundreds of years of languishing in the docket, it raises the question of the legality of the decision in Dillon v. Gloss and sets a precedent for proponents of the ERA to follow in seeking to overturn the expiration of its time limit in 1982. If and when a 38th state ratifies the ERA, that state most likely being Virginia, the matter will probably bounce from the courts back to Congress, where it will have to be settled politically, making the upcoming 2018 congressional midterm elections important for yet one more reason. Until then, smile when you feel like smiling, or not at all.
— Vita

 

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